Influitive Customers Brainshark and Extreme Networks Recognized for Innovative Social Technology Programs

TORONTO, Jan. 6, 2014 /CNW/ - Influitive, the advocate marketing experts, today announced that Brainshark and Extreme Networks are among the nine winners of the Forrester Groundswell Awards, which recognize forward-thinking companies that successfully use social technologies to drive business success. Both companies saw impressive returns after leveraging advocate marketing programs to generate social media word of mouth from customers and employees.

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Brainshark won the Business-to-Business: Social Reach category, which recognizes programs that deliver marketing messages to new audiences. The cloud-based business presentation solution provider used Influitive's AdvocateHub platform to build an online community and engage 450 advocates through challenges and activities that helped support branding and social media word-of-mouth activities. As a result, Brainshark more than doubled their Twitter activity through the program and increased social sharing of their content across their social channels by more than 60%. Even more impressive, Brainshark demonstrated that gains in social advocacy extended across other facets customer commitment when the number of readily available sales references and press references quadrupled.

"Social advocacy and word of mouth are key components of our marketing strategy, and our program with Influitive helped us to convert satisfied customers as well as employees and partners into passionate brand advocates," said Joan Babinski, VP of Marketing at Brainshark.

Extreme Networks won the Business-to-Employee: Collaboration category, which recognizes programs that target employees' use of social technology to improve collaboration. The enterprise networking and security solutions provider incorporated Influitive's AdvocateHub into a larger social strategy to encourage and incent employees to participate in social media word of mouth activities.

"Our advocate marketing program helped increase employee engagement, while contributing to the success of our award-winning Sales 2.0 program," said Ben Doyle, VP of Sales Enablement at Extreme Networks.

"This year we found the smartest companies are moving past 'social exceptionalism' and genuinely integrating social programs into broader marketing strategies," said Forrester Vice President and Principal Analyst Nate Elliot. "Our 2013 winners used social reach marketing to create discovery and awareness; they used social depth marketing to support exploration and consideration; and they used social relationship marketing to foster post-purchase engagement – proving that social programs can support customers all the way through their life cycle."

The Forrester Groundswell Awards recognize excellence in the effective use of social technologies to drive business success. The 2013 Forrester Groundswell Awards mark the introduction of new award categories, based on Forrester Research's Marketing RaDaR research. Business-to-consumer (B2C) and business-to-business (B2B) winners were awarded across four categories: Social Reach, Social Depth, Social Relationship, and Mobile.

About Brainshark
Brainshark enables companies to improve productivity with cloud-based business presentation solutions for sales, marketing and training. With Brainshark's easy-to-use solutions, customers transform static documents such as PowerPoints into dynamic, mobile-ready content that can be accessed quickly and viewed as on-demand video presentations or presented live – anytime, anywhere. They can also measure the effectiveness of their communications in ways never thought possible and use these insights to take action. Thousands of companies – including half of the Fortune 100 – and millions of individuals rely on Brainshark to increase the impact and reduce the cost of their business communications. Learn more at www.brainshark.com.

About Extreme Networks
Extreme Networks, Inc. (NASDAQ: EXTR) sets the new standard for superior customer experience by delivering network-powered innovation and best-in-class service and support. The company delivers high-performance switching and routing products for data center and core-to-edge networks, wired/wireless LAN access, and unified network management and control. Our award-winning solutions include software-defined networking (SDN), cloud and high-density Wi-Fi, BYOD and enterprise mobility, identity access management and security. Extreme Networks is headquartered in San Jose, CA and has more than 12,000 customers in over 80 countries. For more information, visit the company's website at www.extremenetworks.com.

Extreme Networks and the Extreme Networks logo are registered trademarks of Extreme Networks, Inc. in the United States and/or other countries. All other names are the property of their respective owners.

About Influitive

Influitive, the advocate marketing experts, is based in Toronto with offices in Palo Alto and Boston. Today's buyers are increasingly leveraging their peers' opinions and Influitive helps marketers tap into this force with its innovative AdvocateHub platform and Maven mobile app. By capturing the enthusiasm of their best customers, followers and evangelists, marketers gain direct support for their sales and marketing programs. From social media reviews and customer referrals to case studies and references, passionate advocate help support all stages of the buying cycle. Influitive's customers include some of most successful and fastest-growing business-to-business software and technology firms in the world. To learn how to get your advocates working with you, please visit www.influitive.com.

SOURCE: Influitive

Jim Williams, VP of Marketing, Influitive, [email protected], [phone]

http://www.influitive.com

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